Monday, 3 August 2015

Arrival

Coming back to NILE brought back a lot of memories which had been buried somewhere at the bottom of my memory. Before I came to Norwich, I didn't seem to be able to remember much about the topography of the city. Walking to NILE, however, triggered all the interred images and put them into the foreground of my mind again.

Classes

What did we do? Russell made us - the six participants from four different countries - get to know each other with an image spider on paper.
We were then introduced to Blended Learning when we discussed different definitions of the term. It turned out that we have to differentiate between technology-enhanced learning and real Blended Learning which has a component of in-class-activities and home activities closely related to them.

Technologies

TodaysMeet

We used a website called TodaysMeet which allows students to make written contributions to an ongoing discussion, brainstorming or any other activity in class. All the texts can be projected on the screen for everybody to see.

TTV

Luckily, Russell runs a website with videos that explain all the technologies we are learning.

http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/sharing-discussing/todaysmeet.html

If you click here, you can watch an example of his videos.

Monday, 10 August 2015

Activities

We read about different models models of Blended Learning (see this article and our evaluation)
The next great topic was what the Flipped Classroom is and what its pros and cons could be.
Giannni gave a talk on how his school uses Moodle to evaluate students' work.
Russell continued his introduction to Screencapture and presented the tool called Camtasia, which is much more sophisticated than Jing and SnagIt, but also more demanding in use (and more expensive to buy as well).
Finally, - more on the fun side - Russell introduced us to the website lyricstraining. I realise Elton John's "Crocodile Rock" is still stored in the recesses of my memory...

Technologies

The evaluation of the different concepts of Flipped Classroom models was a good example of what google docs are good for.

Tuesday, 11 August 2015

Activities

We discussed the term VLE, which stands for "Virtual Learning Environment". It is a workspace containing a repository plus tools for the various task you may want to carry out in Blended Learning (or in web-enhanced or pure online learning for that matter).
The main part of the day was spent on getting to know Edmodo, which is one of the tools that are available for VLE. Another would be Moodle. However, it is not free and more complicated in use.
Ania gave a talk on how she gave her course an upgrade with a video on the idea of lumen as a measure for light output.

Technologies

We learnt how to do the following things on Edmodo.

• posts
• replies
• polls
• quizzes
• assignments
• folders
• tracking

By the way, Russell recommended using Firefox for Edmodo. And again, the iPad needs an app for Edmodo. The app has a slightly different lay-out from the website but has worked well so far.

Wednesday, 12 August 2015

Activities

Russell again pointed out what an important book the online collection of articles on Blended Learning by Brian Tomlinson and Claire Whittaker is (see below).
From this book, we analysed five case studies of Blended Learning projects from all over the world, considered their pros and cons and presented our findings in a short talk using a grid which Russell had prepared on Google Docs.

(Blended Learning in English Language Teaching: Course Design and Implementation; ed. by Brian Tomlinson and Claire Whittaker)